The Creative Life

Watching the SBS1 TV doco¹ on Franco Zeffirelli yesterday made me think about the comparisons and contrasts between the life of a writer, a composer, and that of a producer and director. Of course, I became especially interested in how his creative activity was similar or different from mine. Each writer, each producer and director, each music composer has a different story, a different way to look at their creativity and the creative process. Zeffirelli will soon be 90 and I will soon be 70; he was an entre deux guerres baby and I was a war baby; he has achieved fame and wealth; I am an unknown, financially comfortable but far from wealthy. My wife would call us poor. -Ron Price with thanks to ¹”Franco Zeffirelli,” SBS1, 2:30-3:30 p.m., 5 February 2011.

Comparisons are odious,¹

but inevitable in life, and

more inevitable for some

of us as we journey life’s

path….Your mother died

when you were 6 & mine

when I was 33; you went

for the theatre in your 20s

and I went for university &

a teaching career……..You

went for Catholicism and I

went for the Baha’i Faith!*

Homosexuality seemed to

be in your bones while the

heat of sex turned me into

heterosexuality—and both

of us kept our sexual-style

all our lives…By the 1990s

and 2000s you were getting

knighted and receiving so

many honours and I was

retiring from decades of

work as a teacher….....

I wish you well, Franco, in

your remaining years on the

mortal coil that remain with

Jesus in the very depths of

your spirit as Baha’u’llah is

in mine: two men, one spirit.²

¹ Comparisons are odious, Proverbs 141; comparisons are odorous, Much Ado About Nothing, act 3, sc. 5; Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394-1476), comparisons are odious. De Laudibus Leg. Angliæ. Chap. xix.

² Franco Zeffirelli, Wikipedia, 6 February 2011

Ron Price

6 February 2011

Updated for: Young Composers Music Forum

on: 19/4/'12